Resumen
A so-called sunlight-reflection staring control for spacecraft on low Earth orbit is discussed such that the sunlight, reflected by an on-board reflector, will point to a target point on Earth surface during a short period of time. The new method begins with the establishment of the target reference frame, whose attitude quaternion, angular velocity and acceleration are calculated afterwards. An back-stepping based control technique is adopted to achieve the attitude tracking and guarantee the tracking error angular velocity will be constrained in a predefined region. Moreover, the conditions under which the sunlight-reflection staring is analyzed, and the geographic information of the actual staring point are computed to analyze the accuracy of the method. The simulation section results validate the control performance.